Dopey Deadlines & Deadbeat Democrats

By Alan Caruba

Is Tim Geithner the most clueless Secretary of the Treasury this nation has ever had? Is he the Eddie Haskell of national debt, so eager to please Obama that he has been a party to driving it up by trillions since his master took the oath of office?

Now, we are all forced to witness the idiotic political machinations of the White House trying desperately to put off the greatest financial debacle to face the nation in its entire history. It’s so bad that Moody’s Investor service has the U.S. “under review” to take away our unparalleled triple-A rating.

What makes his August 2nd deadline to raise the debt ceiling particularly obscene is that it is the anniversary of the 1776 signing of the Declaration of Independence.

For you history buffs, August 2nd was also the date in 1934 that Adolf Hitler became the Fuhrer of Germany and the same day, five years later in 1939 that Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard wrote a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt urging him to begin developing an atomic bomb.

It makes you wonder if history isn’t just a record of wars won and lost, along with an unbroken series of mistakes that would make any sane person scratch their head in bewilderment.

How did the United States of America go from Thomas Jefferson, the brilliant author of the Declaration of Independence to Timothy Geithner, a very upwardly mobile student of government and monetary affairs?

Suffice to say, as a public servant, he has served to the satisfaction of his mentors in numerous positions and also in liberal enclaves such as the Council on Foreign Relations and a three-year stint at Kissinger Associates, learning from one of the most Machiavellian characters of the modern era. At the tender age of 42, he was named president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The liberal elite take care of its own.

Geithner is the ying to Obama’s yang. They are perfectly suited to each other because both get their jollies playing the great game of state, although it should be said that Geithner is far better prepared for that role having studied abroad, including two years, 1981-2 studying Mandarin at Peking University and Beijing Normal University. His M.A. is in international economics and Asian studies from John Hopkins University School of advanced International Studies.

Obama’s education ended with a law degree from Harvard. Nobody knows what grades he made at Occidental, Columbia University or Harvard. He is often mistakenly referred to as a former professor of constitutional law at Chicago University, but in fact he was akin to a teaching assistant or adjunct, the lowest end of the academic ladder.

Obama’s mentors included a known member of the Communist Party when he was growing up in Hawaii, various “Marxist professors” at Occidental and Columbia University, and Bill Ayers who gained fame as a domestic terrorist, a member of the Weather Underground who describes himself as a “Communist with a small c.” To bring matters full circle, Ayers is a retired University of Illinois at Chicago professor.

All this is by way of background to suggest that the debt ceiling will be increased because there is no alternative.

The Washington Posts’ Jennifer Rubin, a Washington Post White House reporter, posted this on their blog on July 13th.

“Today’s White House meeting suggests there is no deal remotely in sight on the debt ceiling. A GOP aide familiar with the talks told me, “Today was the most tense meeting of the week. In fact, the president ended the meeting by abruptly leaving the room. During the meeting, the speaker challenged the president to offer real spending cuts. He said the gimmicks and accounting tricks that Washington has used for decades are not applicable here.” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has had enough. “When White House officials attempted to justify budgetary gimmicks, the speaker said pointedly ‘We’re not doing that anymore.’”

At some point you wonder what is the point of keeping the talks from public scrutiny. The pathetically passive media is not demanding particulars from the White House. So, Obama sits back, refusing to present any significant cuts. He’s serious about three things: making the Republicans out to be the bad guys, doing nothing to upset his base and insisting on tax hikes. If this is where he really stands, it’s time, perhaps, to pull the plug or pull back the curtain on the charade.”

The only thing on Obama’s mind is how to position himself as the hero that saved America from the tripling of a huge debt that is mostly his making and to make the Republicans look like horrible people for insisting that the government stop spending money faster than Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve can print it.

As Karl Rove recent wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “The president has not only governed as a liberal—he’s governed as an incompetent liberal, thereby reminding voters that electing a Republican Congress and president next year is the only way to change direction.” A recent Gallup poll has Obama losing to any generic Republican candidate!

Little of this before, on, or after August 2, 2011 has anything to do with a responsible response by the Democrats in Congress or the White House to a huge debt that just keeps getting bigger with every passing day.

Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, once said, “It's not tyranny we desire; it's a just, limited, federal government.” Americans, since the beginning of the 20th century have been suffering the tyranny of socialism and a bloated government with seemingly no limits on its growth or its spending.

© Alan Caruba, 2011